Enrichment
The Cross Rail Project

22nd September 2014
- Infrastructure has gone from the loss account to the profit account in British politics in recent years
- Increasing recognition that the skills, expertise, capabilities brought to bear in delivering major projects will help to support the regeneration of high value-added manufacturing in the UK
- There is now a much deeper understanding of the links between modern infrastructure and global competitiveness
- HS1 was built twenty years ago - giving a fast Channel Tunnel link through the South - £4.7bn
- Heathrow Terminal 5 £4.3bn
- London 2012 including the Olympic Park - £8bn
- CrossRail £14.8bn (currently on time and under budget)
All part of the National Infrastructure Plan which contains 40 priority projects with more than £370bn of work in the pipeline
- London will have an extra one million people living in the city in ten years time
- Cross Rail services scheduled for full operation in the Spring of 2019
Cross Rail provides
- 10% extra capacity for London
- 24 trains per hour, 200 extra journeys enabled each year - extra capacity is built into the design
- £42bn of economic growth over the life-cycle
- 3million square feet of property being developed
- Relief of pressure on other underground lines such as Central Line will increase their ability to handle traffic within capacity by an extra twenty years
Funding - Who pays? Who benefits?
- TFL (Transport for London) is providing £7bn and central government is giving around £5bn.
- 60% of Cross Rail is being paid for by Londoners including the extra 2p in the £ business rate over the next 16 years
- BAA plc and City of London also significant contributors as well as some property developers
Wider Economic and Environmental Gains
- Reduction in train noise
- Improved station energy consumption
- Nature reserves created, more than 3120m spent creating neighbourhoods in and around new CrossRail stations
- Lightweight trains using regenerative braking
- New spaces for artists, new theatres and community spaces
- 55,000 jobs supported directly by the project
- Enough new housing development to fill 16 Shards
- More than 400 apprentices
CrossRail is now the 5th biggest property company in the UK - an output of building smart infrastructure
Progress - Scale and Complexity - some quotes from the talk
"CrossRail has set new standards and new benchmarks for how major infrastructural projects will be completed in the future"
83% of tunnels already constructed, over 36km
Each of the assets in the project has a minimum of 30 years active use in the life cycle
CrossRail has completely mapped the underground of London using more than 450 digital maps - it took two years to understand what is under the city!
The human capital involved in the project is vast - the starkest manifestation of the importance of know-how in building and sustaining competitiveness
The length of the project covers a geographical area where the variance of wealth is extremely high - Cross Rail focused on heightening the social and economic returns for eastern London
HS2 - £15bn to double capacity on the north-south route - in 20 years time we will laugh at ourselves if we have not spent the money on developing this incremental capacity through the HS2 project. China is building the equivalent of 4 HS2 projects every year.
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